The Repositioning of Citizenship and Alienage: Emergent Subjects and Spaces for Politics

The two foundational subjects for membership in the modern nation-state, the citizen and the alien, are undergoing significant changes in the current period. The effect is a partial blurring of each the citizen subject and the alien subject. Some of these changes are not formalized and hence become particularly evident in certain types of contexts, foremost among which are cities. These can be seen as productive spaces for informal or notyet-formalized politics and subjects. In this examination of emergent possibilities, I first outline these changes vis-à-vis nationality and citizenship. Second, I dissect notions of national membership in order to create a set of tools for reconstructing citizenship analytically. In the third section, I delineate two key, incipient kinds of repositioned membership: unauthorized yet recognized subjects, and authorized yet unrecognized subjects. Fourth, I situate these repositionings within contemporary currents of citizenship theory. In the final section, I theorize the landscape of the global city as an especially salient site for the repositioning of citizenship in practice. At the scale of the city, and the particular urban space of the global city, there are dynamics that signal the possibilities for a politics of membership that is simultaneously localized and transnational. Most of the scholarship on citizenship has claimed a necessary connection to the national state. The transformations afoot today raise questions about this proposition insofar as they significantly alter those conditions which in the past fed that articulation between citizenship and the national state. The context for this possible alteration is defined by two major, partly interconnected conditions. One is the change in the position and institutional features of national states since the 1980s resulting from various types of globalization-linked policies. These range from economic privatization and deregulation to the increased prominence of the Correspondence Address: Saskia Sassen, Professor of Sociology, University of Chicago. Email: [email protected] 1474-7731 Print=1474-774X Online=05=010079–16 # 2005 Taylor & Francis Group Ltd DOI: 10.1080=14747730500085114 Globalizations May 2005, Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 79–94